09 December 2010

A BERD in the hand...

A report out today shows a drop in BERD for the third straight year. This is a real problem for Canadian productivity. We need to realign the HERD|BERD imbalance in order to arrest our innovation free-fall. This news comes fast on the heels of the recent report that BERD dropped in the US for the first time since tracking began. The recession is being blamed for the Canadian BERD drop, but as I indicated in my last post, there's no recession in research. Further, if history is our guide, recessions are times when we must push ahead on innovation.

A related story shows that stock markets punish those firms that invest in innovation. This is a sad statement and indictment of the kind of short term thinking that gave rise to the economic meltdown in the first place.

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